The Baader-Meinhof Complex(9/20/2009)
It’s no secret that many people view the Best Foreign Language category of the Academy Awards as a mess. Between the country by country submission process, the process of selecting a shortlist, and the process of choosing five final films, there are a ton of roadblocks in which snubs can occur. This was made particularly clear in 2007, when important films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days were ignored in favor of off the radar oddities like Beaufort, Katyń, and 12. Many also complained about the 2008 lineup, but if you think about it they really stepped up that year. Among the nominees were the Palm D’or winner The Class, critical favorite and future Criterion-laureate Revanche, the wildly creative animated documentary Waltz With Bashir, and Departures, a film whose victory baffled many but which got solid reviews once people finally got a chance to see it. Really, that’s what the category’s major problem is, its dealing with movies which few people have actually had a chance to see and which have had no ability to get buzz stateside. That’s probably the problem that The Baader-Meinhof Complex had when its nomination baffled many. Had it had the stateside released then which it is now finally getting it might have been less of a shock.
The film tells the true story of the RAF, that’s not the Royal Air Force, it’s the Red Army Faction; a group of disillusioned youths who turned to violence in an attempt to cause social change in late sixties Germany. The group could probably be equated to The Weathermen, except that they were more violent and more active than that American group. In short, these were left wing domestic terrorists who reaped havoc throughout Germany for about a decade, and that’s a topic that needs to be approached carefully.
The title refers to RAF members Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), who became the group’s most famous members. However, the movie does not necessarily focus on either of them and they do not appear to be bilateral leaders of the organization. Rather, this is an ensemble film about an organization that appears to have been somewhat loosely organized. Baader is the member who more closely lives up to what one would expect from an RAF member, he’s young, angry and political. The kind of person who’d normally just wear a Che Guevara T-Shirt but who instead ended up taking arms and emulating him. Meinhof is a bit more intriguing. She began her career as a respected left wing journalist, but finally came to sympathize and ultimately sacrifice everything in order to join the group.
These young people are raging against a lot of things around them, particularly the ongoing war in Vietnam (for which the United States has been using bases in Germany), the treatment of Palestine by Israel, and the general belief that corporations have been controlling everything. They come to the conclusion that to do nothing in the face of all this would be as much of a sin as the conformity the previous generation showed in the face of Nazism. That’s what drove them philosophically, additionally; they were living in a time of worldwide counterculture which is something the film shows very well. The film has a number of montages (perhaps too many) that really drive home the environment which bread this organization and why so many of the youth in Germany came to sympathize with them.
The group’s build is rather interesting as there is a fascinating gender equality to the Baader Meinhoff group. Three of the most important RAF members (Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), and Meinhof), are women and many of them act as aggressively as the men. Do not expect Baader and Meinhof to be some kind of Bonnie and Clyde style lovers in crime. This is the late 60s and the group practices free love, a fact that does not amuse their Palestinian colleagues as evidenced by a scene where they went to a terrorist training camp and gained the reputation of being screw-ups among their peers in the terror business.
Of course, amidst all the 60s clothing and rock music, one must face the fact that these people were killers. Perhaps they were idealistic and well intentioned killers, but killers none the less. That’s what makes this subject matter so challenging; terrorist are probably the least popular people in the world today and with good reason, how do you make these characters sympathetic enough to follow without glorifying them or whitewashing their less savory aspects. This is perhaps not unlike the challenges posed by making a serious film about gangs and organized crime, but magnified by the political elements. To deal with this Edel has chosen to make this a straightforward film about historical events told with meticulous detail and research. Stefan Aust’s book was clearly important to this production for far more than its catchy title, one feels like Edel was interested as much in making an accessible illustrated historical record as he was in telling a cinematic story.
The history here is interesting enough for such a treatment, but it’s also the movies Achilles Heel. The material is never dry, but because this is trying to be so accurate there are developments that go against the nature of film storytelling; important characters emerge in the final act and events occur that seem separate from the main narrative thrust and in general it affair seems a bit unfocused. One wonders if this would be perfected if Edel had been willing to composite a few characters and simplify elements. Quentin Tarentino lovingly asserted in the finale of Inglorious Basterds that film is a stronger force than history, and while I certainly am not recommending that The Baader Meinhof Complex needed to take any departures as radical as Tarentino did, I do think Edel probably should have taken his duties as a film maker a little more seriously than his duties as a historian. Still, the way the film steadfastly presents history in a way that is cinematically compelling if not narratively clan, does make for a very interesting film.
***1/2 out of Four.
An Education(10/30/2009)
Early in this decade a movie came out called High Fidelity, which got very strong reviews but was avoided by myself for a very long time. The idea of a romantic film starring John Cusack did not appeal to me, but eventually I did see it and was surprised to find it was a very well thought out story made more endearing by the fact that it uses a music fanatic as its main protagonist. This film was based on a novel by a man named Nick Hornby, and while the way that Stephen Frears and his team of writers adapted the film certainly had a lot to do with its success, I’d be willing to bet that the heart of what that made the film special was in the pages of Hornby’s book. Ever since that production Hornby has been a pretty hot commodity in Hollywood, adaptations of his work include About a Boy and Fever Pitch (which was made into an English version about soccer and an American version about baseball). But now the tables are turned, and now Nick Hornby has become a screenwriter adapting someone else’s work, in this case a memoir of a British journalist named Lynn Barber about her coming of age.
The film is set in suburban London circa 1961 and focuses on a sixteen year old girl named Jenny (Carey Mulligan) who is both beautiful and the smartest girl in her class. Her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) have her on a strict regimen that will hopefully result in her being accepted to Oxford. One part of this regimen is that she’s taken up the cello, and this leads to a chance encounter after a band rehearsal with a man in his thirties named David (Peter Sarsgaard) who offers her a ride home. After this encounter David begins to romance Jenny and invites her on extravagant outings with his friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike). Jenny’s teacher (Olivia Williams) and headmistress (Emma Thompson) become concerned with this affair and warn that it will threaten her future education, but a life with David is beginning to seem like just as viable a future to Jenny as Oxford, after all he’s able to bring her into high society without having to waste time with a bunch of petty students for three years.
Perhaps the thing this film will be most remembered for is that it introduced the world to Carey Mulligan. Mulligan has heretofore mostly accumulated credits for small parts on English television and is probably most noted for a small role alongside Keira Knightley in the Joe Wright adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. Her work here has been championed as a breakthrough and I will not disagree, she has real star potential. For this role Mulligan must be a teenager who thinks she’s wiser than she really is and has an energy that makes her standout amongst her peers. In this sense the role is not unlike the title role in the 2007 film Juno, albeit in a completely different time and place and without the Diablo Cody-isms. Like Page before her she is able to walk that line between appearing naïve while outwardly trying to exude sophistication and spunk.
She is however just one part of a very strong ensemble. Peter Sarsgaard has the difficult task of making the audience forget that he is a thirty-something creep trying to sleep with a teenager so as to show why said teenager would fall for him. He needs to be charming and pleasant, while also having a bit of that dark side beneath the surface. Alfred Molina is also going to get a lot of attention for his work here, and this is well deserved. His character is pretty funny in his often silly values, and this could have played pretty fake if the actor wasn’t up to the task. Molina makes the father character seem like a real person, even when he’s places the value of knowing a famous author above being a famous author. Actors in smaller roles like Cooper, Pike, Williams, and Thompson also nicely fill out the cast.
Like Mulligan, director Lone Scherfig has emerged from obscurity as an important talent out of this project. I’ll bring up Juno again as a point of comparison, because like Jason Reitman she seems able to give an ambitious directorial edge to her work without suffocating the material with overwhelming style. She’s able to emphasize the glamour of Jenny and David’s outings in a way that makes it seem as intoxicating to the viewer as it does to Jenny in a way that is essential to the believability of the story. Of course this would all be wasted were it not for the solid script by Nick Hornby who further proves that he has a knack for creating endearing and likable characters while giving them really clever, but not overly stylized dialogue.
As I’ve established, there was a lot of talent put behind this and it shows up onscreen, but I ultimately couldn’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the end result. I can’t help but think that Lynn Barber’s story was perhaps not worthy of all this talent. It’s clear from the beginning that this relationship is heading for disaster and that Jenny is walking into a trap, so this isn’t really much of a romance. And while there are some good giggles throughout I wouldn’t really recommend it simply as a comedy, so how is this going to stand on its own merely as a story? This is where the house of cards falls down, because as a story this is actually a pretty simplistic work preaching the moral that younglings shouldn’t try to grow up too fast, they should stay in school, and not try to take shortcuts. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s basically the best written, best acted, and best crafted afterschool special ever made. This shortcoming is made worse by a twist towards the end which prevents the character from learning something for herself and instead has the truth thrust upon her.
If ever there has been a movie that more toughly challenges Roger Ebert’s adage that “it’s not what a movie is about, but how it’s about it that matters” in my mind. The “what” that this movie is about is rather boring to me, but the “how” it’s about it is very strong. Ultimately, I’m going to have to split the difference and recommend that people see this movie in order to enjoy it in the moment, enjoy the acting, enjoy the script, enjoy the filmmaking, but the whole affair is more shallow than it first appears and it avoids a lot of the tougher questions involved in favor of light-handed moralizing.
*** out of four
DVD Catch-Up: Goodbye Solo(10/24/2009)
You may have never heard of Ramin Bahrani, but his films are among the most important movies coming out of the United States today. Bahrani has made three films now and while none of them have come close to penetrating the mainstream, all of them have an aura of something new and special. His distinct style clearly owes a lot to the Italian Neo-Realist movement (some have glibly called his style neo-neo-realism), as each film depicts a character struggling to survive in poverty and he extensively uses non actors in order to make everything as authentic as possible. I discovered his first film, Man Push Cart, on the Sundance Channel and was immediately transfixed by the travails of the central character as he tried desperately to make ends meet on the streets of New York. His follow up, Chop Shop, also depicted a side of the big apple which has heretofore gone unnoticed by the general public and the world seemed all the more tragic because it was a child placed at the center of the film. My opinion of both of these films has only grown upon reflection and I was certainly excited to see what Bahrani would show us next. His newest film, Goodbye Solo, shifts locations from New York to North Carolina but this does nothing to diminish the newest fascinating slice of life from this important filmmaker.
The film opens in a taxi cab driven by Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), a Senegalese immigrant with a young family who aspires to become a flight attendant and leave behind his cab. In the back seat of the car is William (Red West), a grumpy old man who’s become very depressed and disillusioned as of late. William has made a proposition to Solo, in a few weeks he wants to be driven out to an area landmark called the Blowing Rock, he doesn’t want a return trip. Solo asks if William plans to jump off this rock but receives no answer. After Solo accepts a hundred dollar deposit for this grim task he decides to try befriending William in hopes of eventually dissuading him from his suicidal plans, but William may be beyond saving at this point.
While Bahrani’s first two films were squarely focused on a single character, this one focuses on a pair of them. Solo, like the immigrants in the first two films, is trying to slowly build a life for himself through tedious day to day work. Unlike the other two, he’s got a family of sort including a step daughter. The other major character is William, who’s played by veteran bit player Red West, though if this were a mainstream film he probably would have been played by someone like Nick Nolte. He’s a gruff old man who doesn’t speak a lot and who isn’t willing to wear his heart on his sleeve. William always resists Solo’s attempts to help him, but one gets a sense of growing respect between the two. This relationship could have easily turned into a saccharine weep-fest were the story placed in the wrong hands, but Bahrani does a very careful tightrope walk and makes the story real rather than contrived.
A big part of the appeal in Bahrani’s films is the way they let you eavesdrop into the lives of people you normally don’t have contact with. Chop Shop was particularly good at this; it was set in the middle of Queens but felt like it was set in a foreign country. Goodbye Solo does not maintain this same sense of foreignness, but it does feel like it’s peaking into a part of the country that isn’t always fun to think about. Bahrani has never ended on an overwhelmingly unhappy note, and each one of them has been more hopeful than the last. The ending of Goodbye Solo is particularly strong in the way it manages to balance hope and melancholy through a few well chosen images.
Writing this, I consistently find myself referring back to Bahrani’s previous work and comparing. Such is the nature of the man’s oeuvre, in a particularly auteurist way he’s managed to make statements in individual films that are magnified by their place in a larger body of work. These are some of the best films about the American immigrant experience that I’ve ever seen and in bringing the techniques of Italian neo-realism into the 21st century, Bahrani has crafted a unique style that has only improved over the course of three films. I’m dying to know where Bahrani goes from here, until then we have a trilogy of excellent films to admire.
**** out of Four
Paranormal Activity(10/23/2009)
In this brave new world of digital cameras and youtube we’ve been hearing people talk at length about the notion of amateurs making films in their backyards completely removed from “the system.” I’ve never really been a believer in the concept. Sure there have been a handful of very good micro-budget movies in the past few years but the chances of them really breaking out into the public at large seems to be about the same as they were before all this new technology when people like Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Richard Linklater put out similarly budgeted movies to similar success. But, if there’s ever been a clear example of the new system working it’s got to be the new thriller Paranormal Activity, which was made in seven days on a budget of fifteen thousand dollars by someone with no formal film training.
The film takes place entirely in the house of Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston), a young couple that is “engaged to be engaged.” Katie has been hearing strange noises in the night and feels it is part of a pattern of odd occurrences she’s been sensing occasionally since she was a young girl. Intrigued, Michah buys a professional grade camera he hopes will help them to better document what’s been going on, especially while the two of them are asleep. As their project goes on they do indeed start to pick up some strange occurrences on the tape like a door moving on its own and a few odd noises. They are not sure how to react to what’s been going on but as the nights go by the events the camera picks up start to become more and more threatening.
This is essentially a haunted house movie, but in a way it isn’t. It’s established early on (by a psychic) that the force behind this disturbance is not a ghost, but a demon. Further it is established that this demon is not linked to the house the couple is living in, rather it has been targeting Katie since long before she found her way to this luxurious San Diego residence. This is a very smart bit of exposition because it eliminates the thing that almost always sinks haunted house movies: the notion that the characters could solve all their problems by simply moving. The choice of a demon rather than a ghost is also smart, something about the idea of a demon (which is distinguished as being a non human force as opposed to a deceased human spirit) just conjures up creepier images in the mind.
This plot is actually remarkably similar to a horror movie of a much different kind from earlier this year, Drag Me to Hell. Both films are about women who find themselves targeted by demons and must seek assistance from various paranormal “experts.” The difference of course is that Drag Me to Hell revels in its silliness; it’s a fun, loud, movie and all of its thrills were right in your face. There’s nothing wrong with any of that and I don’t make this comparison to disparage Sam Raimi’s film, but Paranormal Activity takes almost the exact opposite approach with a similar concept. The approach in Oren Peli’s film is decidedly minimalist in comparison. Here the titular activity comes slowly into the film, the demon does things that are clearly beyond logical explanation but which seem oddly more disturbing because they are done in a way that is still oddly close to reality. Of course this approach would have quickly become tedious if Peli had remained too subtle for too long, thankfully he knows just when to start making the demon more daring in his appearances. This is not like the Blair Witch Project where they wait until pretty much the last shot to actually have something happen.
Which I suppose brings us to the fact that this is yet another “found footage” movie. Ever since the aforementioned phenomenon of a film there have been a lot of these movies, and after each one gets made everyone feels like they’ve just seen the last film that will get away with the format before it becomes lame, and yet more and more come out to prove there’s still life in the technique. Between [REC], Cloverfield, and this film the ante just seems to keep going up. Perhaps the main appeal of filming a movie like this is that it requires less of a tech budget and less formal training to accomplish, after all, when trying to emulate an amateur a certain lack of professionalism actually helps rather than hurts your film and even the more heavily produced examples of the genre like Cloverfield are cheaper than their competitors. To a mainstream audience crappy film stock is a pretty big distraction unless there’s a narrative reason why what they’re looking at is a lot uglier than the latest Platinum Dunes splatterfest. But let’s not take that to mean that anyone could have made a movie like Paranormal Activities, because trust me, everyone is trying and there’s a reason why Oren Peli’s movie is the one in more than a thousand theaters right now and everyone else’s isn’t.
Of course, like many types of genre film, these found footage films need to establish their rules early on. For example, both Cloverfield and [REC] took the approach of having the movies (sort of) play out in real time, with cuts only occurring when the camera operator choose to turn his device off. This film and The Blair Witch Project instead choose to suggest that the people who found the footage edited the film together. Perhaps the bigger (and decidedly more meta) decision that must be made is how to present the film. The Blair Witch Project made the mistake of presenting the material as if it were a real documentary telling an authentic story even though it was quite obviously fake. The thing is, absolutely no one really thought that movie was real, they were just having fun playing along with the fiction the filmmakers had created. However, there were plenty of people who thought they were surrounded by morons who really did believe it and the result was a backlash perpetrated by those who thought they were smarter than everybody else. That’s why Paramount pictures has been pretty carefully avoiding any claims that this is anything other than a scary movie and selling the project more on the communal experience of seeing it in crowed theater full of screaming people. However, once people have entered the theater the movie still operates in a way that will accentuate the illusion of reality. The film actually has no studio logo at the beginning (an almost unprecedented rarity) and even more surprisingly it has no credits, something I didn’t even know was legal in this day and age.
Something that probably gives this a leg up over its underground competition is that it has managed to snare a pair of actors that know what they’re doing. In many ways, trying to act in a mockumentary seems to be as distinct from acting in a scripted film as acting in a scripted film is to acting on stage. The people acting in movies like this have to achieve a special level of naturalism while working with dialogue that is not flashy and they don’t have the luxury of perfect camera angles. Moreover, the actors themselves need to be both anonymous and average looking, while still trying to make the audience empathize with them. Brian De Palma’s film Redacted gives an excellent example of what not to do when acting in a movie like this, and yet there’s probably yet to be an example of such acting that’s so overwhelmingly good as to provide a high point to compare other films by. Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston (the characters share their names with the actors) are for the most part just the kind of actors that a film like this needs. Both look just like the kind of people you’d run into on the street, they talk like average Joes, but they also have personalities you can sort of latch onto. Featherston in particular makes for a very pleasant screen presence, she feels like that friend of a friend you have and this kind of familiarity helps breed a lot of empathy for the character.
There are however some problems that do hold this movie back from minimalist perfection. In particular, I was a bit annoyed by the way the characters acted in order to deal with they’re situation. Katie desperately wants to call a demonologist to help with the situation while wants to dissect the situation further, mainly through the use of the camera. Both of these seem like workable plans, but neither of them are mutually exclusive, and yet each of them is openly hostile to the other’s plan. Micah’s refusal to call the demonologist is particularly frustrating, I can understand why he’d be wary of the notion when the haunting seemed less than real, but there’s a certain point where the existence of this phenomenon becomes undeniable and at that point the two would do any and everything that they need to do in order to solve their problem. Even after this point Micah refuses to call the one person who by all accounts can deal with the situation, claiming that he’s going to deal with the problem himself. What? It’s a frickin’ demon, what the hell does this guy expect to do? Punch it? And Katie’s refusal to examine the video evidence is at times just as silly. You’d think that these people would be desperate enough to accept any help they can get and the notion that there’s some sort of conflict of interest between the two approaches doesn’t really make any sense.
Another problematic element emerges when the movie begins to try to explain what’s been going on. Throughout the movie, there are a lot of hints and clues as to a larger explanation of what’s been going on to Katie. Other cases are found, a history is established and photographs are found. None of these are particularly obtrusive except that they’re complete red herrings that don’t really add up to much of anything. The nature of this haunting is never really explained, in fact that give the movie a lot of its creepy feeling. In fact I’m glad they never explain the nature of this beast, but in establishing a mystery without a solution they are sort of setting the audience up for an anticlimax. Don’t get me wrong, the ending itself is quite good and the last shot is a real doozy, but it feels particularly abrupt because they’ve made it seem like we’re owed a few more twists before this finale.
Is Paranormal Activity just a product of clever marketing? No, it’s the real deal. But that’s not to say that it’s some sort of classic of the horror genre. The movie is not a perfect gem, nor was ever likely to be one, there’s a certain risk/reward payoff to filming a movie like this and this has gotten about as much out of the concept as it possibly could. Like The Blair Witch Project before it, this will probably be remembered more as a triumph of marketing than as a triumph of filmmaking, but the people in the marketing department aren’t rainmakers and this triumph of marketing would not have been possible were it not for the important fact the Paranormal Activity works. Oh, and don’t listen to the people telling you that this is best enjoyed when watching it with a theater full of screaming douchebags, I saw it at three in the afternoon in a theater with maybe ten people in it and it worked just fine.
***1/2 out of Four
The Informant!(10/10/2009)
Contrary to what Ayn Rand may have told you, corporations are for the most part evil. When left to their own devices they will gladly screw over their competitors, their employees, and their customers if it will make them a little more profit. This is why they make such effective Hollywood villains, they have a long history of activities that would make Darth Vader blush and deep down they have almost no remorse. Since every villain needs a hero to vanquish them, Hollywood has invented someone to put a white hat on: the whistleblower. While the whistleblower genre probably doesn’t have as many websites dedicated to it as other sub-genres, it’s actually a pretty populous category of film and like most things that are done to death people are beginning to get a bit sick of its pattern of self-riotousness and manufactured drama. So, when it came to light that Steven Soderbergh was making adapting the story of real life whistle blower Mark Whitacre it was safe to guess we’d get something more than standard genre fare, and from the moment the film’s trailer came out it was clear that was the case.
Based on the nonfiction book by Kurt Eichenwald, this film tells the story of the man who helped the FBI conduct one of the biggest price fixing scams in American History. This investigation began when the company called in the FBI to deal with an extortion scheme reported by Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), an executive in the lysine division of ADM. Shortly into an investigation by agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula), Whitacre reveals that he and his colleagues have been illegally conspiring with other companies to systematically drive up prices worldwide. Whitacre agrees to wear a wire and collect evidence against the company he works for, and in doing so is able to collect an unprecedented amount of evidence for the FBI. Whitacre claims he’s doing this to clear his conscience, but he doesn’t really seem all that torn up about lysine consumers, so why is he doing this? That will turn out to be the key question at the heart of all of this, because Mark Whiticre is not exactly what he seems.
The conventional wisdom about Steven Soderbergh is that he does big budget studio produced films filled with celebrities in order to build the cache required to make low budget experimental films starring non-actors. Because of this reputation critics are inevitably going to deride this as one of the former, but really this whole notion is something of a misnomer. This may have a bigger budget than something like Bubble and it may star an A-list celebrity, but deep down the way this film handles genre is just as experimental as a lot of those other projects. If you go to one of those seminars they have to teach screenwriters how to build successful formulaic films step by step, the first thing they’ll tell you is to focus on a character with a clear motivation and to have that motivation drive the plot. As such, this would have largely focused on the goal of bringing down ADM and stuck with this conflict throughout if this were a conventional film. Instead, this movie becomes defiantly disinterested in the fate of ADM and instead focuses on what the title says it will focus on the informant.
This informant himself is a pretty odd character played brilliantly by Matt Damon. Whiticre is a strange person who seems more like Ned Flanders than Deep Throat. He’s in his forties, has a bad comb-over, and a goofy looking mustache. More importantly, the guy’s a doofus; he’s the antithesis of the intense image of businessman that Gordon Gecko embodied. At times Whiticre seems to not grasp the stakes of his actions, and the film’s voice over track is clouded by his odd stream-of-consciousness musings about subjects ranging from the German word for pen to the thinking patterns of polar bears. This man’s existence is certainly one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” type creations and making him believable had to have been a hefty challenge. Fortunately Matt Damon brings Whiticre to the screen excellently. It takes a little while for Damon’s achievement to really sink in, but when you compare his performance here to the badass he was when playing Jason Bourne and it becomes immensely clear how much of a range Damon has as an actor.
Because Whiticre is so strange many have come to label this movie a spoof, but I’d hesitate to use that term simply because it conjures images of broadly comic films like Aireplane and Scary Movie, and this film is neither as silly as those films nor is it trying to be as funny. However, this film does play with genre conventions in a way that’s not completely unlike what spoof films do. This is a movie that easily could have focused other elements, chosen a different tone, and used different techniques and end up looking like a remake of The Insider. Instead Soderbergh is able to make this movie a completely different through a handful of unexpected decisions. For example, the film has adopted a very 1970s aesthetic (even though the story is set in the early 90s), this would seem like a logical enough choice if one was trying to channel the corporate thrillers of that era like The China Syndrome, Serpico, and Silkwood, but it isn’t really the serious filmmaking of the 70’s that he’s channeling. Rather, Soderbergh is channeling everything that was kind of tacky about the era like the gaudy font the captions are in or the unexpected but compelling smooth jazz score by Marvin Hamlisch. As such, the film’s aesthetics sort of play with what we’re supposed to expect from this kind of movie just as much as the script does.
Ignoring all the genre trickery we do still get what is on its own a very fascinating story. Mark Whitacre is an enigma, one that has not been completely cracked by the time the credits role and a big part of the joys of this film are trying to figure out just what makes him tick. What’s more strange is that aside from some of his more self-sabotaging habits, Whitacre isn’t too different from most corporate executives. He’s a man who lies, cheats, and steals almost as a habit then hides behind an “aw shucks” smile, the only difference is that he seems to believe his own bullshit. In focusing on this personality we get a much better look at the face of corporate crime than we ever would watching the heroes take down another anonymous board room filled with mustache twirlers. While I wouldn’t place this in the upper echelon of Soderbergh’s work, this is a movie that deserves as much respect and analysis his movies which wear their experimental nature like a badge of honor.
***1/2 out of Four
(500) Days of Summer(8/12/2009)
One of my favorite online past-times is to read a blog called “Stuff White People Like.” This is a satirical site that catalogs and explains various things that white people (by which they mean hipster yuppies) disingenuously enjoy out of a subconscious desire to be hipper than thou. Every entry of this blog deals with a subject like “Organic Food,” “David Sedaris,” or “New Balance Shoes.” So why do I bring this up? Because I think the people who write for that site could write an entire book about how much of the new Indie romance (500) Days of Summer has been done in order to impress white people. Among the entries of that blog which would apply to this film are: “Apple Products,” “Indie Music,” “Irony,” “Juno,” “Girls With Bangs,” “Musical Comedy (courtesy of a brief but conspicuous dance scene, more about that latter),” “Modern Furniture,” “Bad Memories of High School,” “T-Shirts,” “Architecture,” “Wes Anerson,” “Having Two Last Names (courtesy of star Joseph Gordon-Levit),” and I’m probably forgetting a few.
The film announces from the beginning (via a monotone voice over reminiscent of The Royal Tenenbaums) that this is a story of boy meets girl, but that it is not a love story. The boy is Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a twenty-something working at a greeting card company in spite of the fact that he holds an architecture degree. The girl is Summer Finn (Get it! Her name’s Summer and the movie is called 500 Days of Summer!) who is played by Zooey Deschanel. Summer is the new assistant at Tom’s greeting card company, they have little to do with each other at first, but eventually they bond over their enjoyment of the band The Smiths. Soon they hook up, but it’s clear that they are both looking for different things in a relationship. Tom believes in true love and is out looking for “the one,” while Summer is a free spirit just looking for a good time. Their relationship goes for many ups and downs over the course of the film and eventually they must either reconcile their difference or, well… the voice over did say this wasn’t a love story.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about the way “mini-majors” (The “independent” divisions of major studios, ala Miramax, Focus Features, Sony Pictures Classics, etc.) control things when they are producing movies. Bear in mind that this refers to the movies they actually produce, not necessarily the ones they purchase and distribute. The conclusion many have drawn about these studios is that they control productions just as much as the major studios do, that the “independent” label is merely a marketing device. The “mini-major” who’s most notorious for this is Fox Searchlight Pictures, the people who brought us Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine, and Juno. Now of course those are good movies, and the mere fact that a studio has control over a film doesn’t mean it will automatically be bad, but it can be a big roadblock to true creativity, and this will rear its head in movies from studios like this that are less successful than the aforementioned titles. I bring all this up because (500) Days of Summer seems to me like a ground zero for just how crass mini-majors have become.
At its heart, I think this movie does have a pretty cute story that has a whiff of authenticity to it, but all of that has been steamrolled by a lot of derivative and obnoxious directorial tricks courtesy director Marc Webb, who unsurprisingly has a background in music videos. It feels almost like the script was given to some sort of mad scientist in the Fox Searchlight labs (we’ll call him a quirkologist), who went through it and decided to add every whimsical “indie” cliché he could think of. It’s got a non-chronological narrative, a load of pop culture references, an indie rock soundtrack, moments of unexpected animation, and even a god damn spontaneous musical number that’s been added for questionable reasons. The base story is of course inviting such a treatment in many ways; after all, it’s about a mopey quarter-life crisis guy who seeks happiness via a manic pixie dream girl. For those who do not know the phrase “manic pixie dreamgirl,” it’s a work coined by critic Nathan Rabin to describe women in films that appear out of nowhere merely to serve the purpose of acting wacky and lifting up the film’s male protagonist. Zach Braff’s Garden State and Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown both did as much with this archetype as was ever needed and this movie seems rather superfluous. Oh, and don’t get me started on Tom’s magically precocious little sister who gives him love advice.
Now in spite of my general distaste for this film’s derivative elements and general obnoxiousness, there are aspects to it that were clever. Earlier I glibly dismissed the film’s non-chronological narrative as one of a list of indie clichés it indulges in, but the truth is that the technique was uses pretty effectively here and if that were the only of those clichés it used I probably wouldn’t have made the complaint. Also, there are some genuinely funny moments sprinkled throughout the film, I especially liked the film’s customized “the events are fiction” disclaimer at the beginning and the reading of a greeting card that Tom writes while in the midst of depression. Also, the acting in the film is mostly admirable. While the film’s main character is a whiney tool, the way Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays him makes him seem a lot more relatable than the character that’s written on the script. Zooey Deschanel is trying to do something similar, but the script has placed more obstacles in her path than in her co-star’s.
When all is said and done, this is a very irritating film. It’s a romantic comedy that uses hip techniques and references to hide the fact that at its heart it’s just another date movie. That said, it does at least try to hide this fact, which is more than can be said of the cookie-cutter nonsense like The Proposal which has dominated the genre for the longest time. As such, it probably is an above average choice if one is looking to take someone of the opposite sex to see something that could be called romantic. Under all other circumstances I’d advise against seeing it.
** out of Four
A Serious Man(10/2/2009)
If in 2005, you’d asked me about the importance of the Coen brothers to the world of film, I probably would have sadly reported that they might have been on the road to irrelevance. After all, their 2004 remake of The Ladykillers was not well received, nor was their previous film Intolerable Cruelty. Even the films they made earlier in the decade like The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother Where Art Thou? were by no means unmitigated triumphs. What a difference two years make. In the last two years the Coens have not only reclaimed their crown as American masters but have gone a step further. With their 2007 Oscar winner No Country For Old Men they made a taught thriller while pushing their aesthetic forward, and with their 2008 comedy Burn After Reading they proved that they could still make hilarious and accessible comedies while maintaining their dark sensibilities. I’ve always loved the Coens when they’re making broad comedy and dark thrillers; but their 2009 victory lap A Serious Man takes the form of that third type of film they’ve made throughout their careers, quirky/metaphorical dramedies, and that’s the side of their oeuvre I’ve never quite been able to close the deal on.
Set (and setting is never an unimportant detail in the work of the Coen brothers) in a Minnesota suburb circa 1967, A Serious Man sings the ballad of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish professor of theoretical physics. Gopnik is up for tenure as the film begins and his son will soon be undergoing his Bar Mitzvah, but he soon finds himself in the middle of an existential crisis. Gopnik’s brother Arthur (Richard Kind) seems to be deep in some shady dealings and has come to live with Larry. Worse yet, Gopnik’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) tells him that she’s been seeing another man named Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) and that she wants a Get (a divorce within “the faith”). If that weren’t enough, he’s having a moral crisis over how to handle a Korean student who has left him an envelope of cash in order to receive a passing grade and he’s been getting threatening calls from the Columbia Record Club. As the movie goes on, these troubles seem less and less like coincidences and more and more like a series of tests from “Hashem.”
The Coen Brothers have always been an auteurist’s dream; they’ve had an incredibly distinct yet oddly adaptable style that absolutely envelopes everything they touch, at times almost to a fault. Fitting this film into the Coens’ body of work is one of its bigger pleasures. The film’s Minnesota setting will immediately invite comparisons to Fargo, but that’s a red herring, this film’s depiction of that setting is pretty different and its story is less literally blood soaked. Narratively I’d probably compare it to The Man Who Wasn’t There in that it’s about an ordinary man whose world collapses around him, tonally I’d probably compare it to the dead faced Miller’s Crossing, but the movie I’d most readily compare it to is Barton Fink both in its surrealism and in its spiritual overtones.
As such the film will probably fit pretty well into the Coen cannon, but its real gift to those analyzing the Coens as auteurs is much richer. This is a very personal film for the Coens, as it depicts the place where their odd, subdued psyches formed, as such this could be something of a Rosetta Stone for their sensibilities. The suburb here is unnamed, but it is presumably the Coens’ hometown of St. Louis Park, an old inner-ring suburb west of Minneapolis. The place has a very large Jewish population that lives among the town’s otherwise gentile Midwestern inhabitants. As I am myself a Minneapolis resident, I can attest that this is indeed a pretty detailed an accurate depiction of the area, although a lot has changed since 1967. St. Louis Park doesn’t look as desolate now as it does in the movie (which was actually filmed in a suburb called Bloomington), but there still is a pretty large Jewish population there. Less important than the look are the mannerisms and the details, which rang a lot more true here than they did in Fargo, a film in which everyone seemed to talk like they came straight out of a bad Ole and Lena joke.
All this meticulous setting detail isn’t just window dressing either; it serves to explain a lot of the main characters psychological state. Larry Gopnik is made to feel like an outsider in this suburb filled with mowed lawns and gruff gentiles who play catch and go hunting. His knowledge of Physics seems to mostly go unrewarded (he says he’s never published) and he’s only got three mostly unhelpful Rabbis to turn to during his crisis of faith. Gopnik’s nebbishy tendencies might have served him better in New York where he could have made friends with Woody Allen or something, but here he’s pretty much on his own. Also interesting is the effect the setting has on his children, particularly his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) who is most likely a stand in for the Coens. The summer of love exists only on the radio for Danny and he’s pretty aggressively uninterested both in his father’s travails and in the faith that makes him an outsider. One can picture him eventually getting bored enough to pick up a guitar to imitate the Jefferson Airplane music he’s always listening to, or if film had been his area of interest, perhaps a video camera.
Philosophically, the film addresses the age old question of why bad things happen to good people. That’s never really been a concern to secular thinkers like myself, but to people like Larry Gopnik who feel they are under the protection of a benevolent God, it is a conundrum.
Many have seen the film as having been based on the book of Job, and I will not disagree, in fact there are images toward the end of the film which all but confirm the connection. Essentially, Larry is subject to every cruel unpleasantly that the Coens can throw at him, but he puts up with it all because of his faith and his passive aggressive nature. I’m no theologian so I’m not going to comment on this too much; but I’m pretty sure that the Coens have changed the story’s ending to cynical effect, and that I like.
Some have said that the Coens have used celebrities as a crutch as of late, something this film will never be accused of as this film is pretty much devoid of them. The cast here is for the most part solid but anonymous, many of them being never before seen on film. Michael Stuhlbarg is quite strong in the lead; he manages to walk the fine line of nebbish stereotype, always falling just on the right side, and as his desperation grows he’s able to perfectly panic while trying desperately to internalize as much as he can. Richard Kind is probably the most recognizable face in the whole film, and he brings a pretty good presence to the whole thing. Similarly, Fred Melamed brings a real “that guy” presence to the film. If those names aren’t obscure enough for you, the Coens have also filled the movie with people who’ve never been in a movie before like Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, and David Kang who fit in right alongside the anonymous veterans.
Had this film come out in 2005 (in the wake of the Ladykillers debacle) it probably would have been called a return to form, coming out 2009 it’s more like a return to weirdness. In spite of all the film’s many merits, this is simply a movie that is almost smothered in the Coens usual quirks and it will probably baffle anyone who isn’t a diehard Coen veteran. Coen films are almost never “for everyone” and this one is even more “not for everyone” than usual, and I’m not sure it was “for me.” This is a film that is hard to truly like but almost impossible not to respect.
*** out of Four
DVD Catch-Up: I Love You, Man(8/11/2009)
As much as I’ve liked the R-rated comedies that have been coming out in the last half-decade, there are some trends amongst them that have been annoying to me. One of these annoyances has been the rise of the word “bromance” in order to describe movies about close friendships between men. The truth is that this isn’t a new or original story-type, in fact stories about men trying to sort between the values of friendship versus romance can be seen in a Shakespeare play called “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and can probably be traced even further back. Still, there are some people who insist on glibly labeling movies about friendship, and since every coined meme needs a point of oversaturation we have now been given a movie that’s takes this term to an extreme point where it stops making sense.
The movie focuses on a real estate salesman named Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) who has just become engaged to the love of his life, a woman named Zooey Rice (Rashida Jones). In the process of planning the wedding, Klaven realizes that he doesn’t have any male friends he’s close enough to in order to ask them to be his best man. His father (J.K. Simmons) reminds him that he’s always been a “girlfriend guy” whose relationships with other men have fallen by the wayside. So, Klaven goes on an odyssey guided by his gay brother (Andy Samberg) to find a best friend. Eventually he meets Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), a single free spirit who lives in a tricked out man’s den. Seeing his potential “bro,” Klaven starts a friendship with Fife but realizes that friendship can sometimes be harder than romance.
As you can probably percieve, this movie’s setup is more than a little problematic from the get-go. Perhaps there are people in the world like Peter Klaven, but I doubt that they’re ever going to be as much of a clear cut case as he is, what’s more I doubt they’re going to come to as much of a sudden realization as he does. Also bizarre is Klaven’s plan to find a friend for the primary motive of having a best man at his wedding, what’s more, how the hell can he expect to form such a strong friendship in a mere six months? Close friendships are just not something you go out and actively try to form the way you actively try to find girlfriends.
And this brings us to the movie’s next major problem, namely that its entire premise is based around trying to make the formation of a friendship fit inside the tropes of the romantic comedy. This is problematic firstly because it means adopting the many weaknesses and clichés of that genre. More importantly, the whole concept of this film is flawed to begin with; friendships and romances simply are not as superficially similar as the movie is trying to say they are. As such the characters behave very strangely throughout the course of the film and the whole thing just rings pretty false. The stakes involved in a friendship, especially weird friendships that are expected to form in a few months, as they would be in a real romance. As such, the ups and downs of this relationship just aren’t very dramatic as the movie leads up to its lame anti-climax.
All this could have been forgiven if the movie had been very funny, but it isn’t. Segal and Rudd are good performers, but the material they’re working with is not very good. The dialogue is not particularly sharp and the gags are not very strong. There are a few decent chuckle moments along the way, and the performances are workable. In fact, like a lot of mediocre romantic comedies I’d say that this film is kind of watchable in spite of its immense flaws. However, the simple fact is that this isn’t as funny as the typical R-rated comedy and it probably isn’t going to get anyone laid the way a romantic comedy, so what use does this thing serve? Not much.
** out of Four
Inglourious Basterds(8/21/2009)
Right now, Quentin Tarentino is operating on a level which few filmmakers can come close to. For almost two decades he’s been a leading figure in the world of cinema and in all that time he’s never quit refining his unique style, every film he’s put out has only served to prove just how much of a natural eye for cinema he has. His first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, are undisputed classics of the crime genre. His 1997 film Jackie Brown may not have pleased those looking for carnage, but it revealed a degree of maturity that may not have been readily apparent in his earlier work. After a relatively long hiatus he reemerged in 2004 to deliver Kill Bill, a film of the utmost craftsmanship whose first half proved Tarentino’s proficiency at action filmmaking and whose second half revealed layers of pathos which may not have been apparent at first. Then there’s Death Proof, the film featured as the second half of the Grindhouse double feature he put together with friend Robert Rodriguez. This film was not widely loved upon its release, but I stand by it. It certainly will never be looked at as one of Tarentino’s major works, but I think its unique narrative structure and razor sharp dialogue will be better appreciated by those who give it a second look. But amidst all of this activity there was always the prospect of his legendary World War 2 project, a film which he had been working on as far back as that post-Jackie Brown hiatus. The script he’d been working on began to take on legendary proportions and after more than a decade the movie has finally emerged complete with its deliberately misspelled title: Inglourious Basterds.
Set in a World War 2 that would be more recognizable to an Id Software designer than a historian, this film tells a pair of stories that are fated to collide in its final sequence. The first story is that of a French Jew named Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) whose family is killed by a ruthless Nazi tasked with hunting down Jews hiding out in occupied territory. After four years she has adopted the name Emmanuelle Mimieux and begun managing a movie theater in the middle of Paris. After meeting a German war hero named Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), her theater is chosen as the new venue for the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film about Zoller’s exploits. The other storyline is that of the titular commando unit which is composed entirely of revenge seeking Jewish American soldiers but led by the southern born and supposedly part Apache Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who claims that he is “in the killin’ Nazi bidness, and… bidness is a-boomin’.” This premiere is quickly revealed to be a hotspot for high ranking Nazi officers. So the “Basterds,” aided by an SAS agent played by Michael Fassbender, decide to target the place for an attack; but Shosanna has plans of her own.
You may not have noticed it amidst all the trouble Lars Von Trier was causing, but when Inglourious Basterds debuted at the Cannes Film Festival it was pretty divisive. I think that’s going to be the case for a lot of Tarentino’s films for a while, possibly for the rest of his career. In the directors own words in a GQ profile by Alex Pappademas “I’m not a nice-guy artist. When my movies come out, they draw a line in the sand.” Tarentino’s style has basically become its own monster and those who don’t like it will probably not like his films; he stopped making movies for “everyone” a long time ago. Those who do appreciate his artistry however will be rewarded in droves by his recent work and especially what he does with this latest film.
I found myself oddly excited by this film’s opening credit sequence, I say oddly because those credits are just large white letters over a black background. That may not seem like much but I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen such simple opening credits projected onto a big screen. This is the kind of credit sequence that people seem to have lost patience for a long time ago. Today, if there even is an opening credit sequence in a mainstream film it’s almost always either on top of the opening scene or at least accompanied by some other kind of added stimuli. These minimalist credits pretty perfectly establish the kind of courage and patience that Tarentino will use throughout the film and the scene that follows theme, a tense conversation between a vicious Nazi (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer (Denis Menochet), embodies the attitude. In the hands of any other filmmaker this scene would have been a five minute throwaway, in Tarentino’s hands the conversation is a fifteen minute epic that builds upon itself until it finally pays off to heartbreaking effect. One suspects that the influence of Sergio Leone is at play in this, and many other long scenes like it, which build up for longer than one would expect only to be resolved through fast bursts of action.
We live in a time when screenplays are all too often written to exacting formulas and rules. The scene I described above is most definitely not within these rules and if someone with less clout had tried to submit it he would have quickly been shot down by a Hollywood reader unable to process such creativity. As the boldly two-act Death Proof proves, Tarentino has never been one to follow rules, and he breaks them with joyous abandon throughout Inglourious Basterds. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of short sighted reviews complaining about the film’s length, and I’ve got news for them: this movie is a minute shorter than both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and I didn’t hear anyone bitching about their run times back in the day. Granted, I’m sure most of these critics will claim that they are complaining about pacing rather than the actual running time, but frankly I’m getting more than a little sick of this lazy shorthand that has gotten out of control among critics as of late. Roger Ebert’s adage that “no good movie can be too long, and no bad movie is short enough” comes to mind. To me, if the material on hand is all gold I can watch it for hours on end. Nine out of ten times, if a movie is “too long” one should probably answer why it isn’t worth watching for as long as it runs rather than why it runs as long as it does.
I can understand why this pacing may come as a bit of a surprise to those who had their expectations shaped by Harvey Weinstein’s deceptive advertising campaign which makes this look like some kind of hyper-violent movie that mainly consists of Brad Pitt murdering Nazis. First of all, Brad Pitt is not the main star of the film; he’s just one part of a larger ensemble. In fact I’d be willing to bet that he has less screen time than some of the less known actors. This also isn’t an action film, there are no scenes of open warfare and the violence that is here is graphic but brief. Of course this kind of false advertising has been a staple of Tarentino’s career. Despite their blood soaked reputations, neither Pulp Fiction nor Reservoir Dogs really had much onscreen violence at all. People were similarly disappointed when Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vol. 2, and Death Proof weren’t the action-packed blood baths they had been lead to expect. In general, Tarentino is not the carnage-meister that the public seems to think he is, and this film is no exception. Those looking for savage pleasures will probably leave disappointed, but hopefully there will be others who leave happy they witnessed something much grander than the low brow thrills they were promised.
As I just mentioned, Brad Pitt is not this film’s star, but when he is onscreen he makes for a very enjoyable presence. He goes all out in his depiction of a violent redneck hell-bent to kill Nazis. Those disappointed that Pitt isn’t a bigger part of the film can take solace in the fact that the rest of this ensemble more than matches his work. Perhaps the performance that most surprised me was that of Mélanie Laurent, a French actress whose previous work was unknown to me. Laurent has the always tricky role of a character forced to conform to a society they inwardly despise. Throughout the film she has a lot of banter with Daniel Brühl, a Nazi who’s clearly attracted to her. Brühl has perhaps an even trickier role because, while he’s a loyal Nazi, he seems like a genuinely nice guy and you suspect that in another life these two might have made a good couple. Both of these actors must perform in both French and German (more on that later), and another actor forced to contend with the language barrier is Michael Fassbender who plays a stiff upper lip Brit who must speak German in order to infiltrate Nazi circles. As for the titular “Basterds,” not many of them were given enough screen time to stand out. I’m sure that many will pick on the performance of Hostel director Eli Roth and Tarentino’s decision to cast him. My answer to this criticism is the same response I have to those who complained about Tarentino’s own cameos in previous movies (and the various M. Night Shyamalan cameos for that matter): that the only reason they are so bothered by their performance is that you know them as a director, if Eli Roth had just been some dude from central casting no one would have even bothered to comment on his performance, because either way he had very little screen time.
The performance that really deserves special attention is that of Christoph Waltz, who has created one of the greatest villains of recent memory. Like many characters here, Waltz must perform in multiple languages (English, French, and German), and no matter what tongue he’s using he comes off like a snake. Making a Nazi come off as evil is easy, too easy, which is why Tarentino does more with the character. This is a character that starts out interesting and only reveals himself to be even more of a devious enigma the more you get to know him. Tarentino could have given Waltz some sort of sadistic weapon or some kind of eye patch or something stupid like that, but instead he simply makes this man a dangerously intelligent and unpredictable opponent with a very strange interpretation of Nazi ideology. At one point he gives a dark speech comparing Germans to hawks and Jews to rats which is right up there with other famous Tarentino speeches like Samuel L. Jackson’s Ezekiel rant, Christopher Walken’s watch speech and Dennis Hopper’s True Romance speech about the Italian lineage. Waltz has already won a well deserved award from the Cannes Film Festival for this award and he also deserves Oscar consideration.
I just mentioned that a number of the characters here perform in German or French, and indeed a good two thirds of this film plays out in foreign languages with subtitles. Ninety nine percent of the time I’d unequivocally support such authenticity in linguistics, but here I’m a bit more on the fence. The only problem I have with the scenes in French and German is that I can’t help but feel like they’re robbing us of precious minutes of dialogue written by one of the English language’s greatest word smiths. Make no mistake, the subtitled dialogue is damn good; one can definitely tell that those scenes have been written with flare, but it just isn’t quite the same as hearing Tarentino lines spoken in the language they were written in. Then again, even the English material is relatively restrained stylistically and adheres more to the work he did on Kill Bill than Death Proof or Pulp Fiction; this probably isn’t going to be the goldmine of quotable lines that other Tarentino movies have been and I think that’s deliberate. In general I do think that having these lines subtitled rather than spoken in English is made necessary both thematically and by the plotline. As the film goes on, communication amongst people speaking foreign languages becomes very important to the film.
Oh, and as for historical accuracy, forget about it. Tarentino claimed to have spent much of his post Jackie Brown hiatus doing historical research for this movie, which had led me to fear he had finally grown up and was planning to make a “normal” movie. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, in fact I suspect that most of this research consisted of watching The Dirty Dozen a thousand times. This movie is set in World War 2 but is not about it, it’s really about something that Tarentino knows significantly more about than history: Film. Let me backtrack on that just a little, I’m sure there is a certain degree to accuracy to the minutia of the movie. The uniforms, weapons, and locations are probably authentic and a certain understanding of history does enhance a lot of the details in the movie, but ultimately the war here represents cinematic imagination rather than reality every bit as much as the criminal underworld of Pulp Fiction was a figment of Tarentio’s imagination rather than a document of any real crime syndicate.
When dealing with Nazis, most films rightfully examine the massive damage they did both during the Holocaust and on the battlefields of the war. But Tarentino seems significantly more concerned with what the Nazis did to the German film industry. It’s mentioned in the film that Hitler’s Germany was largely responsible for the demise of the unmatched Weimar era film industry. The filmmakers that weren’t driven out for being “decadent Jew Intellectuals” would only stay to find their talents wasted on idiotic propaganda films. Is this the greatest sin of the Third Reich? Probably not, and to most of the world it wasn’t worth punishing. So, who better than Tarentino to give cinema its much deserved revenge, something he does with the utmost skill during the films finale which can only be described as “wild.” To Tarentino cinema (and by extension art) is a significantly stronger force than Nazis, than Hitler, than history itself, and nowhere has he so vividly (and literally) expressed this than with Inglourious Basterds.
**** out of Four
District 9(8/14/2009)
For the last decade I’ve heard people talk a lot about how technologies like inexpensive digital cameras, Final Cut Pro, and Youtube are going to lead to a surge of underground creativity. Frankly I’ve never been too excited by the prospect, most of the stuff getting made by these amateurs are either unambitious crap that’s likely to be enjoyed only by those in the immediate family of the makers, or they’ve been boring bits of pretension made by people more obsessed with being “indie” than in making a movie that are actually worth watching. Still the law of averages suggests that something decent would eventually come out of the whirlpool of content floating around the internet, and it looks like South African/Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp may be the first person of this “revolution” to make good, thanks in no small part to his discovery by Peter Jackson. Blomkamp was hand selected by Jackson to direct a film based on the “Halo” video game series, largely because of a short film he made called “Alive in Joburg.” The big wigs weren’t so willing to put that much money in the hands of someone who came into the business in such an unconventional way, consequently that film was indefinitely shelved. To make up for that disappointment Peter Jackson has chipped in to produce District 9, a feature length adaptation of the aforementioned “Alive in Joburg” short. The results produced some very unconventional trailers, and the support of an expansive viral campaign that has resulted in a lot of buzz.
The film doesn’t make a big deal about it, but this is basically a work of alternate history. In this timeline the world was changed when a flying saucer entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 1982 and eventually stopped in the skies over Johannesburg, South Africa and stayed in place for months. When a team cut through the side of the ship they found a group of mal-nourished insectoid aliens, which would not be able to live on the ship much longer (which apparently stopped out of technical difficulties). The solution that the South African government came to was to allow the aliens onto the surface, but segregate them into a large hellish camp called District 9. The film picks up twenty years later and the slums that these aliens have been forced to live in have become even more dilapidated than it was before. Still, this widespread segregation has done nothing to quell public fears, so the government now wants to move all the aliens into a new camp, which promises to be even worse than the old one. Tasked with evicting all these people is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who they want to gather eviction signatures from all the aliens in District 9. Of course the signing of these notices is not optional; it’s just one of the many dumb rubber stamps that governments often use to disguise blatant oppression. While doing this task Merwe is exposed to an alien substance which begins to transform him into one of these aliens, his hybrid nature could be very valuable because it could give humanity insights into alien weaponry, but these insights would mean dissecting him alive. As such, Merwe must break out of the complex and become a fugitive, in order to track down the only aliens that can help him.
Any semi-educated person would quickly see that this story is deeply allegorical, both of South African Apartheid and of stories of human oppression the world over. The aliens are the oppressed minority, the “other,” the poor, the social problem that the government would rather hide than solve. The film’s best statement is the way it points out the absurdity of using segregation (both overt and subtle) as a means of dealing with people. The aliens here live in the most god-awful hellhole one can imagine, the kind of place that guilt-tripping charities show children walking through in their advertisements. To the shame of both South Africa and the world, these slums were not built for the movie; they were simply found and filmed in. Of course it’s not the aliens fault that they live in shit, the government just put them there, and gave them no means to leave. Since they are given no way to integrate into society they have no way to improve their condition, they are simply ignored and forced to fend for themselves with none of the resources the rest of us have. Since society has ignored them, they’ve turned to the only ones willing to serve them, gangs of Nigerian criminals interested in acquiring their weapons. What’s more, they need to contend with brutal cops who are pretty much their only exposure to “humanity,” and who give them no reason to respect or play by the rules of their neighbors. The message here is simple but refreshing: if you treat others like dirt they WILL do the same unto you.
I’d like to thank Peter Jackson, QED International, Tri-Star Pictures, and anyone else responsible for supporting this film and giving it such a confident wide release. No matter how many problems I may have with this film (and I have many) the fact remains that this is significantly more creative than anything in theaters and I heartily recommend it over whatever market-tested bullshit its competing against this weekend. However, I can’t help but think this is something of a missed opportunity on a number of levels.
The film uses a vérité style and fits well in a recent trend in the style’s use in mainstream genre films like Cloverfield and Borat, as well as television shows like “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” This film starts as a mock-documentary presumably for a fictional television station (whose logo can be seen in the corner during these sections). This mockumentary element is not to be confused with the “found footage” format seen in movies like The Blair Witch Project and [REC], the difference being that those movies simply show footage shot by characters while this is meant to look like a fully produced documentary complete with talking heads. But about a half an hour into the film they begin to cut to shots that this documentary crew would have no access to, the bug begins to disappear and eventually the talking heads stop talking, from here on the movie stops posing as a documentary, the handheld look remains but the film turns into a standard work of narrative fiction. I can’t say I was a fan of the way this was accomplished, what was the point of posing as a documentary in the first place if the format was to be abandoned after about a half hour? I suppose it could be said that this allowed for some needed exposition about the world of the film, but why the sneaky transition? How did the fictional documentary end? Did the producers seek to film a documentary that had a beginning, a coda, but no middle? And if so, why so much exposition, wouldn’t the people of the film’s world already be acquainted with all this knowledge? As for the film’s special effects; they were clearly not made with the kind of budget that Jackson himself would have wielded (the film was legitimately made independently and only distributed by a major studio) and are not top of the line, but they do work to tell the story and make up for their occasional crudeness with the creativity with which they are used.
If you look at the marketing for this film you’ll get a pretty good sense of the film’s visual style, the film’s political overtones, and hints that there is action to be found in it. What you will not see is any sign that the film has a main character in it, and for good reason. Simply put, Wikus van der Merwe is a horrible character to put at the center of a film like this. He is not a hero at all, he’s a bureaucratic pencil pusher and something of a nerd. That could have made for a very interesting character, but they never really pull it off. Sharlto Copley plays the guy a little too broadly comedic for my taste; I really wish they had chosen a character who is simply an average everyman to put at the center of this rather than someone who is this aggressively dopey. But the bigger problem is that at the start of this film Merwe is a complete asshole who does hateful things that are in no way excused by the fact that he hides behind laws, red tape, and a smug dorky smile. He’s just as bad as the killer mercenaries who do his bidding, and for most of the movie he operates entirely out of enlightened self-interest and does very little to redeem himself until he magically grows a conscious in the film’s eleventh hour. In short, this guy is not someone the audience should sympathize with or find cool, which I could forgive if they explored the negative side of his personality more thoughtfully but they don’t, he just sort of turns into an action hero halfway through, and not a very good action hero at that.
Why am I picking on this guy? Because he’s the only person in it that we really get to know and as such he has extra burdens to carry. Few of the other humans involved get much more than a few minutes of screen time, but what’s even more criminal is how little we get to see of the non-humans. By this I don’t mean that the aliens have little screen time, because they actually have screen time in abundance, just not meaty screen time. In many ways this film is guilty of the same sin that the film’s fictional society is guilty of, it makes no attempt to get to know and understand the aliens. For the most part these aliens are merely background scenery used to illustrate the titular slum; Blombkamp seems a lot more interested in the ant farm that is District 9 than in the ants that live in it. There’s only one alien in the whole film we know by name and even he is given little personality. Rarely do we ever see an extended conversation involving any of these aliens; I would have liked to know what makes them tick, if they do anything other than buy meat from vendors, what their culture is like, and if they have a leader. And are there any humans trying to advocate for the aliens? What does the rest of the world think of this concentration camp? All of these are questions the movie seems to be interested in, but it never thoughtfully explores them at all. In many ways I wish there had been a way to explore this world outside the limited confines of a thriller storyline. Eventually the film turns into a full on action movie, a very unique and well done action movie, but an action movie none the less. There’s nothing inherently wrong with action films, but in many ways this just seemed a little too easy, are there not ways to deal with issues in science fiction films other than violence?
District 9 probably does vindicate Peter Jackson’s faith in Neill Blomkamp, but only to a degree. With this project Blomkamp has created an interesting universe; I just wish he had found something more interesting to do in it than a Hitchcockian wrong man thriller mixed with touches of Cronenbergian body horror (Merwe’s DNA predicament is straight out of the 1986 version of The Fly). As an allegory this is interesting if not fully fleshed out, as an action film it entertains, but as a drama it leaves something to be desired. The studios were perhaps right to make Blomkamp grow a little bit before he worked on something as big as a Halo movie. Then again if it was going to be anything like the game that movie probably would have focused even more on action than this, but at least it wouldn’t have promised anything else.
*** out of Four
